


life, the one you get

by toujours_nigel



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Everybody Lives, Gen, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Steve Rogers Is a Good Bro, Time Travel, by a technicality but still
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 16:36:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18760270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: "I was speaking to some of Maria's friends," Nat said while those friends--some women in bridesmaids dresses at any rate--got lushly drunk and weepy over Maria resplendent in her white gown. "They speak very highly of the collegiate experience."





	life, the one you get

**Author's Note:**

  * For [filia_noctis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/gifts).



> for my wonderful partner-in-crime, who's having a string of awful days.

The first thing Peggy Carter does when she meets Steve Rogers for the second time is point a gun at him, her hand steady, the Walther PPK unwavering.

Every time he tells this story around Bucky, he says, “Well, of course she did, pal, whaddya expect showing up looking the way you did?”

Peggy’s response--this is a call-and-response joke, see--has shifted over the years from, “Thank you, Sergeant Barnes,” to “I’m so glad one of you is sensible, James,” to an approving pat on the shoulder or--if drunk or in an extremity of exultation--kisses pressed into his temple.

Tony, if he’s around, says, “Attaboy, Aunt Peggy,” and toasts her with whatever he has at hand. On occasion it’s been a blowtorch.

When he isn’t around, Bucky says, “You come back two years after everyone thinks you’re dead, looking ten years older and from nothing like the same location and in nothing like the same clothes, you’re lucky she stopped at pointing that gun.”

But Tony’s around rather a lot--more these days with his driving license and changing bevy of cars and adolescent restlessness running like fire-ants in his blood--and Tony doesn’t know, so Steve gets raked over those particular coals less every year.

Instead he watches Tony and pretends that’s not its own impossibility: Anthony Edward Stark, both younger and older, hogging the cranberries on Thanksgiving and causing a scene every other Saturday because he thinks security clearances should be hereditary. Younger than when Steve first knew him, sure, and older every day than when Steve met him the second time--a crinkled red mass of wailing baby angry at being expelled from the warmth of his mother’s body--but older, also, than he might have been if Howard hadn’t noticed Maria Carbonell till the summer of ’69.

Steve’s not real sure how anyone could miss noticing Maria--who’s an absolute firecracker of a girl, puts the fear of God in Howard better than Colonel Phillips ever managed--but he can kind of see the shape of it, the near-misses that would have spiralled out into what she calls “the world’s most boring tragedy” without Natasha in the mix; the dinner she threw for Steve’s birthday where Peggy brought Maria, the shopping trips she heckled Maria into, the dancing, God, like Bucky hadn’t been bad enough without knowing it was subtly and surely irritating Howard.

Bucky doesn’t like Howard, or he likes needling Howard, or he likes pretending not to like Howard, same as he had in the war, because that’s better than admitting just how starstruck he’d been when he’d first met him. It’s been easier with Tony around: Bucky adores Tony, puts up with pouting and arguments and outright tantrums, shrugs it off and makes pointed remarks about being used to it “without the benefit of genius, Rogers,” and lets Tony around him on days he can barely even stand Steve, when Peggy’s the only one who can lay a hand on him without fear of it being snapped off.

* * *

“Stark men are predictable,” Nat’d said when he mentioned it, like it wasn’t terrifying she’d made a marriage happen two decades before it might have. “If I couldn’t get him to like a girl I picked I’d be worrying I left my talents in the Soul Stone.”

He’d dropped it, hadn’t joked about setting up a matchmaking agency like he’d been planning till he caught sight of her face. He’d thought it’d be easy for her, rebuilding, slipping into a new skin like he’d seen her halfway do a dozen times in the years he’d known her, and she had, she’d done it flawlessly, played into every smug, jingoistic assumption about a Russian defector, but then she’d come sit on his fire escape and smoke a pack of Lucky Charms, make friends with every stray cat in Brooklyn, scandalise his neighbours and the Barneses. He’d offered to send her back, go back with her, now Peggy knew to protest anything to do with Zola, Howard knew to keep on sifting through the Arctic; on watch for it, he had to believe they’d spot HYDRA ingratiating itself, and he’d done what he’d come to do, ensured any timeline he could save Bucky in, he had, even though Peggy and Nat'd done most of the work, and he'd just followed orders.

He _wanted_ to stay with Peggy, now she was letting herself trust him as ’47 thawed into ’48, but he’d had that dance with her twice over and there was a Steve Rogers sleeping in the ice who might be found years or even decades before he had been, and he wasn’t about to, couldn’t leave Natasha alone, not when she’d saved his life a hundred times, a hundred ways, not when she’d kept all the bits of him strung together when his world had shrunk to just her.

* * *

He hadn’t even had to ask, on Vormir. She’d stood up in knee-high water, under the purple sky of an alien world and listened to his half-baked plan and said, “This I’ve gotta see. Alright, Rogers, what’s the plan?”

Then she’d said, “Yeah, no, absolutely not, who died and put you in charge?” and pointed an accusing finger at him and added, “If you say it was me, Rogers, I fucking swear…”

So they’d gone to ’47, and after he was done rejoicing in the way New York smelled right again--a wall of stink in high summer, phew--they’d gone to SSR headquarters and she’d debuted her Russian Defector role, complete with a story of how finding Captain America had helped her reconsider her love for her country, which Steve thought was laying it on a bit thick, but everyone except Peggy had found it palatable. Peggy, well, there’d been the gun, and he’d shown her his compass which had stalled her a bit, but it had been in news-reels, was the trouble, and didn’t mean a thing stacked up against location and clothes and the way he _had_ aged, even if not quite ten years.

Natasha had said, “Tell her,” which had made everything worse, even with the mad-science stuff Peggy was already handling and everything they’d seen in the war, and then Nat had reeled off something about the movement of men and materiel down the Narva that would happen in a month, which had landed them in unofficial house-arrest in Howard’s house till Peggy could verify their intel.

That had been familiar, stuck in a strange house with Nat pretending not to be restless and taking it out on him in endless sparring that went nowhere, as directionless as running on a treadmill: they knew each other too well, had taught each other too much, had sparred too many times, with Sam performatively eating popcorn and giving them scores out of ten.

In-between, Nat had critiqued Howard’s decor, and they’d both eaten mountains of Ana Jarvis’ amazing food. Steve had given in to the badgering and tried learning the basics, but even an eidetic memory was no match for his lack of skill.

“Bucky used to say I could burn water,” he’d confessed after he’d succeeded in making rice that was both burned and undercooked: chalky and crunchy and awful, stuff he might have thrown out even in ’33.

“He knew you better than anyone,” Natasha’d said, and they’d sat with their heads tipped together, contemplating the rice.

Peggy’d come in while they were still sitting like that, shoulders brushing, the way he’d gotten used to sitting with Nat after the Snap, and said, “Miss Romanovna, your information was correct. If you’ll give me a moment with the Captain?”

So Nat’d scampered, and Peggy’d come and sat kitty-corner at the table and slid his compass over to him, and said, “It’s been two years for me.”

“Twelve,” he’d volunteered immediately, “but I was frozen for over seventy.”

“I always knew there was something obnoxiously Arthurian about you,” Peggy’d retorted, but she’d smiled a little, a real one that lodged itself in her dimples. “If you survived that, then I have to hope we can find…”

“So do I,” Steve’d said, before it got any worse. “I’m not trying to steal you away or anything, that’s not why I’m here.” It was, a little, but he wouldn’t pitch a fit if they found the guy in a week; he’d be happy for him, for them, for Peggy.

“You and Miss Romanovna seem close.”

“She’s part of my team; last five years, she’s been damn near all of it. I’d die for her, same as the Commandos.”

“She certainly knows to measure out her intel,” Peggy’d said, dry like the wines she’d coaxed him into smuggling into her nursing-home. “If you’re from… 2020?”

“Twenty-three. I know how it sounds.”

“After the Red Skull, it sounds like the tamest pulp fiction. The real question is why she even knows about the Russians moving assets upriver on an unremarkable day forty years before she was even born.”

“Because they’re not moving assets, they’re moving The Asset,” Natasha’d said, and shrugged when Peggy turned to look at her. “It’s been a moment. Rogers, you want to tell her about Barnes, or should I?”

* * *

He’d pointed out Maria to Nat more as a joke than not, "look at that bright kid in her second year at Vassar, she’s Tony’s Mom in our world." It hadn't seemed important whether she would follow the same path in the world they were in, not compared to the fact that Bucky was flirting gently with the waitress every time she passed their table, dashing even with the left sleeve on his suit pinned up, and would never have to be treated like a weapon. Peggy was on the verge of grinding her heel into his instep, and that was about all the violence he’d have to deal with that week. He could do anything, join Peggy at SSR, help his Pa out at the store, go back to college for two more years on the G.I. Bill, travel the country with Steve like they’d planned on when they were kids who’d be lucky to get out of the city. Hell, Bucky’d still be lucky to get allowed to pack a suitcase, he’d been discharged from hospital for a month, and his Ma’d only let him outta the house after Steve had promised to keep an eye on him.

“I’m turning into you,” Bucky’d joked, and the sun’d never shone brighter or the skies been bluer.

So he’d found out by accident that the gaggle of college girls at the next table included Maria Carbonell, and he’d told Nat because it was almost like Tony was among them _in potentia_ , and it was funny. Everything was funny, everything was wonderful, down to Bucky yelping and Peggy taking a satisfied sip of her coffee, and he’d wanted to share it with Natasha, and she loved knowing things nobody else did.

But Natasha’d gone after it like she’d scented blood in the water, like she’d used to when Fury or Hill brought her a mission she liked, and Howard had gone from never having met Maria to being married to her in two years, give or take a couple weeks.

It hadn’t helped, and Steve, now he could breathe easy with Bucky safe and no more fucked-up than everyone in their generation, had clocked the effort that went into her ease, even before it turned into angry smoking on his fire-escape and endless coffee and occasional rearranging of his furniture. He didn’t mind it, he didn’t mind any of it; Nat was living in a women’s boarding house, same as Peggy, and he only ever got to see either of them when they decided: it would be too easy for Natasha to cut and run if she thought he was outta line.

* * *

But it didn’t make her happy, the way picking on his clothes and hair and inability to date had always made her happy. She just got quieter and pricklier, styled her hair and bought dresses and fit right in. It was a hell of a year to be a woman; even Peggy, shadowed constantly by Bucky and Sousa--and he’d heard all the jokes about that, too, except nobody cracked any around Bucky after the first time--had everyone assume she’d only got her post because of her association with him, never mind he’d been MIA for two years and was bumming around taking art classes. The radio program didn’t help, though Peggy and Natasha had bonded over the introduction of Anastasia Petrovna, a Red Army sniper who had fallen for Captain America.

So he twitched her out of the milling crowd at Howard’s wedding reception, late enough most everyone was drunk and Howard had given up socialising to sit with his colleagues from Los Alamos while Maria’s parents kept on fussing about things that made no sense at all to him, and he could see very little to Maria, who kept trying to ignore them and talk to her friends. They didn’t like Howard, was the thing, he was too old, too self-made, too Jewish, while they were Italian and Catholic and had come over before the Civil War.

“We’ll go back, if you want,” he told Nat, because this meant too much to let her turn it into a show of her skills. “I know I’ve offered before but I’ll come with you, I wasn’t going to make you go alone. We’ve got the Pym Particles, we’ve got our gauntlets, I’ll give you the coordinates. You can be with the Bartons again, you don’t have to stay here because of me.”

“Carter’ll kill us, if Barnes doesn’t first,” Nat said, smiling her awful polite smile.

“No, because we’ll be gone. Just say the word. Well,” he amended, “say the word and we’ll tell them we’re leaving and figure out a plausible accident or something, maybe a training exercise, or hey, we could go to Greenland so when they rescue the Other Guy it’ll all make sense.”

“We can’t go back,” Natasha said, cutting him off, “we’d be creating an alternate timeline at the moment we entered it, because we entered it; from what you’ve told me, that’s how Thanos managed to attack the second time. Even if we could somehow re-enter our timeline where you left it, you got me by giving the Soul Stone back, and I don’t want to find out how my being alive in a timeline where the Stone was used would change things, do you?”

“It's not for me,” Steve protested. “I know Sam and Bucky are going to deal with things just fine, and I like the life I’ve got.”

“Good,” Nat said. “It’s the one you’re getting. Now get me a Manhattan.”

He lingered at Peggy’s table a little on his way back from the bar, but she patted him on the arm and kept right on talking to Ana and Angie, and Bucky was ensconced with some of the SSR boys, talking shop, so he skirted the dancers and handed Natasha her drink, taking a pointed and pointless sip from it while she wrinkled her nose.

"I was speaking to some of Maria's friends," Nat said while those friends--some women in bridesmaids’ dresses at any rate--got lushly drunk and weepy over Maria resplendent in her white gown. "They speak very highly of the collegiate experience.”

“You want to go to Vassar?”

“I haven’t decided. First I need to get Carter to forge documentation. Meanwhile,” she said, and turned on him, “I need to see how well you dance now. And before you ask, yes, this is revenge for sipping my drink.”

* * *

When Nat’s around to hear the story, she hits whichever part of him is convenient--sometimes she gets Bucky or Peggy to do it if they’re closer--and says, “I notice you left out the part where I saved your life.”

“Nat,” he says, every time. “That’d take years.”


End file.
